When President Obama spoke in North Carolina last week, trying to work up enthusiasm of the students at N.C. State University for his American Jobs Act, he asserted that “In North Carolina alone, there are 153 structurally deficient bridges that need to be repaired. Four of them are near here, on or around the Beltline. Why would we want to wait to act until another bridge falls. ”

You can imagine the number of calls to the Department of Transportation, but they say bridges across the state are safe.

The key thing is: We don’t have any bridges that are about to fall,” said Wally Bowman, DOT’s division chief for Wake and six neighboring counties. “We don’t have any bridge out there that is structurally inadequate, where it cannot handle the traffic. We make sure those bridges stay in a good state of repair.”

The Raleigh News & Observer suggested that the president “over-suggested”, which is a pleasant euphemism indeed.

President Obama has been touting the Brent Spence Bridge that links Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky as another of those rusting bridges that need billions of dollars appropriated to create jobs. He’s mentioned that one several times, referring to it as a “bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America.”

The Brent Spence Bridge doesn’t really need repairs. It has decades of good life left in its steel spans. It is simply too busy. The bridge was built to handle 85,000 cars and trucks a day which seemed like a lot when it was built. Today the bridge handles more than 150,000 vehicles a day with the obvious jams those numbers suggest.

But Ohio and Kentucky don’t plan to repair the bridge. They plan to build a new one nearby. The new $2.3 billion Cincy bridge is not even scheduled to start construction for at least four years. Without delays, the bridge will not be finished until 2022.

So this seems to be “There aren’t any shovel-ready projects” once again.

But nevermind. Governments cannot create jobs. (Jobs in government are paid out of taxpayers’ pockets or from borrowed money). But that is not Obama’s intent. If he can stir up enough hope for his American Jobs Act, then when the billions don’t get appropriated, he can blame a “Do-Nothing Congress”. Well, it worked for Harry Truman.

Remember back when Representative Gifford was shot at a campaign event by a deeply disturbed young man, and the left went completely bonkers about “target marks” and “crosshairs” on a map on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page about political districts where Republicans could hope to defeat the Democrat? OMG. Violence. Then everybody started looking in every speech or writing by conservatives for words that might suggest violence. Obviously Sarah Palin’s crosshairs and violent nature, fondness for guns and militant language were what had caused the disturbed Jared Loughner to shoot all those innocent people. Or something like that.

Well, of course, when a little sanity returned to the disturbed Democrats, it became apparent that Mr. Loughner wasn’t a rabid Republican attempting to take over a congressional seat, but a nonpolitical psychiatric case.

Keep the violent language hysteria in mind. Now we have headlines like “President Obama shouldn’t be afraid of a little class warfare.” “It’s a war you’d better win, Attack on the Free Enterprise System, guerrilla warfare, equipping business elites for battle, revolutionary spirit, and the war between the rich and the rest of us.” Consistency is not one of the stronger characteristics of the left.

Liberals are all about seething emotion. They are happier when they hate. Bush-hatred has more or less worn out: perhaps even Democrats got tired of Obama trying to blame everything on Bush. It doesn’t seem to work as a campaign theme anymore. But hatred of the rich — that works. When the Wisconsin public sector unions were screaming epithets and beating drums to keep from having to pay co-pays on their insurance — their most effective attack seemed to be on the Koch brothers who had nothing to do with it, but had the useful quality of being rich.

Markets are continuing to collapse, unemployment climbs, and Obama’s poll numbers sink among practically everyone, for differing reasons. Conservatives think he’s incompetent. Liberals think he’s too weak on conservatives. They don’t want any of that “can’t we all just get along” stuff that they preach when it’s convenient. They want war, and they want it now. And the most effective attack strategy seems to be to hate the rich.

President Obama has enlisted Warren Buffett in his class warfare scheme, with the claim that even Warren Buffett thinks the rich should pay more taxes. And Mr. Buffett obligingly claims that he doesn’t pay as much of his income as his secretary does, of hers. Wasn’t it back in January when President Obama awarded Warren Buffett a Presidential Medal of Freedom — apparently for getting very rich? Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway is a very successful tax shelter, and Berkshire-Hathaway seems to be battling the IRS over billions in unpaid taxes.

Memo to the Left: When you raise capital gains taxes, you get less revenue. When you lower capital gains taxes, you get more revenue. Lots and lots of evidence over many years.

The middle class, no matter how you describe it, outperformed every definition of “rich.” The gap between the rich and the middle class got smaller, not larger — 2001– 2007.

Households earning more than $1 million a year, fork over to government, on average, about 29 percent of their income. Those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 pay only 15 percent.

So the question becomes can you repeat “pay their fair share” often enough to the people who don’t pay any taxes, and the 30% who get money back from the government, to convince them that encouraging President Obama to raise taxes in the middle of a recession will get them jobs if they are unemployed. If this make no sense at all, I think that was my point.